


Insubstantial

by captivelark



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Era, Ghost!AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 04:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4465631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captivelark/pseuds/captivelark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You were powerful and dangerous and . . .” Jehan breathes out and doesn't meet Montparnasse's eyes. “You were beautiful.”<br/>Montparnasse begins to see the boy with the moonlight pale hair everywhere. The boy is just glad somebody can finally see him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insubstantial

It is a terrible thing, to love something insubstantial. Montparnasse knows it better than most.

\- - -

The first time he sees the boy with the moonlight silver hair, Montparnasse has cut a man's throat for the boots on his feet. Montparnasse had seen the portly gentleman walking alone at night and been unmoved, until he had seen the handsome black leather of the boots. They are shiny and new and free of scuffs, and Montparnasse fancies that they look as soft as butter. His own boots are beginning to look shabby, and if there is one thing that Montparnasse despises it is shabbiness in dress. He had tailed the gentleman halfway across Paris, his mind already flitting across how much better they would look on him. The man looks momentarily into an alley, and Montparnasse strikes like a panther. 

He looks up after the deed is done to see the boy at the mouth of the alley. 

At first, he almost thinks that the boy is a ghost. The moonlight reflects off silvery pale hair, and his face is white and he is so slender that he looks like an unexpected gust of wind could knock him over. His clothes are just as pale, cut unflatteringly, almost a decade out of fashion.

No, he chides himself, ghosts do not exist.

He looks back down at the boots that he has prised from the corpse of his victim, satisfied to find that his imagination had not been wholly wrong about their softness. When he looks back up, the boy is gone.

\- - -

Montparnasse is disturbed to see the boy more often, always at night and always after he has committed an atrocity. Part of him wants to attribute the boy's constant appearances to drink or pain or perhaps a trick of the light. Every time Montparnasse goes to approach him, the boy melts into the night as if he was never there at all. It is maddening. Montparnasse has spent his whole life prowling through the shadows, and now he feels rendered incompetent – he should be able to follow this boy just like he follows his prey. How does he disappear so effortlessly?

He bites out the words one night, seeing the boy in his customary place at the mouth of the alley with the pale light of the moon bouncing off his fair hair. 

“Who are you?”

The boy cocks his head to the side and steps forward. 

“This is the third person in as many weeks. Why?” It is the first time Montparnasse has heard him make a whit of noise. His voice is merry but timid, and Montparnasse almost finds himself smiling. Up close, Montparnasse sees he is older than assumed, and there is a fierce tiredness in his eyes. He is also really quite beautiful, in a barely-there kind of way. He looks like he would snap if Montparnasse gripped him too hard. And Montparnasse did so like to grab. 

“Why not?” Montparnasse replies, and barks a laugh. 

The boy's eyes darken. He turns abruptly away from Montparnasse, and a flare of anger goes through him. This boy has been following him for weeks, appearing like an avenging angel at the scene of the deaths that Montparnasse inflicts, and then disappearing again. Now that he has finally spoken, Montparnasse feels like he is owed rather more than a question. He strides forward and goes to grab his arm and whirl him around and demand just who does he think he's speaking to? But Montparnasse's hand goes through the boy's arm and suddenly there is nothing in front of him. 

As he stalks home he has to remind himself that ghosts do not exist. 

\- - -

The boy is sat on the floor by the foot of his bed, his face dejected. Montparnasse is horrified to note that there is a faint shimmer to his movements, an almost translucent quality to the way he moves in the air. He is even more horrified to note that said quality makes him seem even prettier. 

“Who are you?” Montparnasse demands, and the boy's head shoots up and his pale green eyes are panicked. He moves as if to melt into nothingness and Montparnasse finds himself imploring: “Don't- don't disappear. Please.” It is the first time he has said please in what seems like an age. The word 'disappear' sounds silly on his tongue. People don't disappear, and ghosts don't exist. Perhaps he had just indulged in a little too much wine or perhaps he had stayed out a little too late last night-

“Jehan.” He doesn't say more than that. Montparnasse fancies that he can hear the silent 'h' in the middle and realizes the clothes that are more than a little out of fashion are the result of a Romantic, and he hates them more for it. Did this boy die in those clothes? 

“Why are you following me?”

The boy – Jehan, Montparnasse corrects himself – has the decency to blush. Montparnasse would not have thought ghosts could blush, but there it is – his skin flushes pink and he looks away from Montparnasse's dark piercing gaze. “I . . . I . . .”

“Who are you?” Montparnasse repeats, a touch more forcefully. “What are you?” 

“I . . . I didn't think you could really see me.” Jehan says, voice timid. “None of the others can, you know. When you looked up in the alley and you saw me . . . I thought you had maybe sensed something a little out of the ordinary, felt a gust of wind – I didn't realize you could see me. But you kept seeing me, and I kept seeing you, and I thought that. . .” Jehan sighs, softly like a breeze. “I'm the only one, you know.”

* * *

He died in the June battle, and has been aimlessly wandering ever since. Montparnasse wheedles the information out of him in bursts and sputters, although Jehan never catches on. Montparnasse thinks he is just glad to have someone to speak to. Words well up in Jehan like so much water, and he lets them flurry and scurry out, and the only person there for them to find purchase in is Montparnasse. He supposes it's rather tragic, but it is also tremendously and utterly frustrating, especially when he is stalking his prey through the night. 

“Please,” Montparnasse had begged him once, “just be quiet, for a moment. I have forgotten what silence sounds like.” And Jehan had been quiet, but his face had fallen and Montparnasse had felt a troubling emotion that was almost like fondness gnawing at his chest. 

It is on Jehan's instruction that he plants a pot of violets and leaves them on the windowsill. Jehan is delighted with them, and amuses himself by standing by the sill and speaking to them in a low and quiet voice. Sometimes when Montparnasse returns home he is still there, and he is crying. Montparnasse has to water the violets, for the tears of a ghost are not really enough.

\- - -

“I followed you the first time,” Jehan says, sitting on the windowsill beside the aforementioned pot of violets, “because I thought you were handsome and I wanted to know what you were doing out so late. I thought I would compose a poem in your honour – you were like the night itself, like velvet and silk, and I desperately wanted to capture even the shadow of the feeling of watching you. You move like a cat, you know.” Montparnasse grins at that. Cats are solitary and elegant creatures, and he is flattered to be compared to them. “I watched you slit the man's throat and take his boots and I was . . .” The same ghostly blush whispers across his cheeks and he looks at the floor, “. . . fascinated.”

Montparnasse is hit suddenly by the aching desire to take Jehan's chin in his hand and tip his face up to the light. 

“I had always had a fascination with death. All of the great poets are obsessed with it. What comes after death, how love blossoms through even the darkest of things, the inevitability of our own demise. Mortality. And you seemed to hold it all in your hand. You were powerful and dangerous and . . .” Jehan breathes out and doesn't meet Montparnasse's eyes. “You were beautiful.”

\- - -

People come and knock on his door and ask his landlord where he is and why he has not been to any “meetings”. The Patron-Minette send people to his door with alarming regularity, but Montparnasse does not leave the little room where he and his ghost-poet live. 

“Can you feel that?” Montparnasse asks, carding his fingers through where Jehan's hair is. The blonde boy closes his eyes and sighs.

“A little. If I concentrate.” Jehan raises his hand in response and tries to trace the jawline of the murderer. 

“I don't feel anything.” Montparnasse says. 

“Try harder. Close your eyes, it makes it easier.” The thief obeys, and Jehan frowns in concentration and touches Montparnasse's lips, the colour of sin. Montparnasse smirks at the touch.

“You're cold.”

Jehan cannot deadfall a grin. 

“I'm dead, 'Parnasse. What did you expect?”

\- - -

Sighs. 

Whispers.

The shimmer of Jehan moving in the night.  


The violets by his window, in full bloom. 

\- - -

If Montparnasse tries hard enough, Jehan is almost warm underneath him. If Montparnasse closes his eyes and presses his lips against the poet's, they are almost wet and they are almost firm and they are almost almost almost there. 

He tries to pretend that that is enough. 

To love something insubstantial is a terrible thing.


End file.
